Rarely a patch goes by without there being some ‘bug’ report concerning “Mythical Black Scourge,” “Mythical Bonescavenger Deathgrips” and “Mythical Dracarris” and asking how players could be expected to nab enemy kills using their own abilities when the pets should be doing all the work. I have been pushing for more hybrid pet builds to succeed for years - including making a thread specifically suggesting ways hybrid pet builds could work. Mythical Black Scourge, sadly, has been the black sheep where no amount of added items and buffs could make this concept work. I want to specifically spell out what is lacking and what improvements to class skills and items need to be made before such a concept can even be feasible.
Of course, lost in the oft-repeated mantra of “hybrid builds don’t work” is by what people expect for a build to “work.” For the purposes of this thread, I will define “works” as being able to defeat all Campaign Nemeses- especially the AoM trio of Grava’Thul, Aleksander, and Kuba- while being able to complete up to Gladiator 150 with the procs from these weapons contributing a non-negligible portion of the build’s overall damage. I’ve attempted to address these shortcomings in previous threads, but with a patch as large as v1.1.6.0 just released, I wanted to bring this discussion up to date.
It’s no surprise that pet builds have to juggle an extraordinary number of things that non-pet builds don’t have to worry about: they have to reach a reasonable threshold of DPS, but they don’t have the advantages of Cunning or Spirit dumps that non-pet builds can employ. Pets don’t have movement runes that allow them to zip across the stage like non-pet builds. Players have to equip for giving their pets enough health and resistances in addition to keeping themselves alive, and that’s before we get into secondary resistances like Slow Resistance and Mind Control. Pet builds don’t have the advantages of ADCTH that provide them with a secondary source of sustain. Finally, a good portion of pet items have 0% player damage bonuses; in fact, a good number of pet items had their already existing damage bonuses removed! Add all that up and you wonder how pet builds manage to keep themselves alive before they can worry about providing their own sources of damage.
Ideally, the way to be able to handle all of this is to heavily invest in a big nuke that can handle the killing requirements while proving a lot of “all skills in” that one class so that the mandatory pet abilities are not neglected. The Necromancer class is fortunate to have two abilities that can admirably perform this task: Bone Harvest and Reap Spirit. Sadly, there is only one Set that provides both Bone Harvest bonuses and pet bonuses, and that’s the Mythical Corruptor’s set. I’ve attempted to make this set work in the past, but the Armor values of an Epic level 82 set are so low as to be depressing. Being able to cap Bone Harvest while investing in pets, providing them with adequate %Total Speed and mitigating the harshest drawbacks to a Vitality build (Dying God’s Health drain, heavy Energy usage from using Bone Harvest + Reap Spirit, Necromancer not having a heal ability, etc.) is an impossible task. Outside of MI’s, there are very few 2H weapons which can provide good base damage while giving relevant skill bonuses (Bonescavenger Grips now converting 50% pet Physical damage to Vitality and Mythical Spiritbinder’s 50% pet Elemental damage to Vitality means that any attempts to make a Cold pet build using the Winter King Sword, Reap Spirit, and Bone Harvest with the 2H Cold transmuter are now #deadbuild), so as much as we’d like to use a more active playstyle with pet builds, the equipment necessary to make it happen either lacks pet stats, pet resistances, or player resistances to create a build where the player and our pets don’t instantly disintegrate with the first mildly menacing AoE pool that comes our way.
Even with all those problems, at least Vitality pets are somewhat well-supported, with Reap Spirit pets being immortal and high damage, Necromancer having passive Vitality RR, and Bone Harvest supplying Soul Harvest with pet flat Vitality damage and player %Vitality damage. Take away all of those benefits with no discernible nuke while retaining all the negatives above and you end up with Chaos pets and Mythical Black Scourge. The changes this weapon received in this patch? +1 to Shaman skills, where there is no Chaos RR or damage or even an ability to summon the critters. Never mind the fact that any Chaos pet build must compete with Mythical Witching Hour, which provides a boatload of pet %Chaos damage while providing +2 to Occultist skills and good enough flat RR baked into the ability so you don’t have to divert your devotion path towards obtaining it from Acid Spray. Let’s dig into how, theoretically, a build using Mythical Black Scourge is supposed to work. What could be conceivable ways to make Chaos pets while having a Chaos nuke that can kill enemies that summon the Scourge buggers?
- Occultist + Necromancer: Again, forget that Mythical Witching Hour exists. There’s the off-hand that converts Reap Spirit from flat Aether to flat Chaos and the Necro conduit that provides additional flat Aether to Reap Spirit (which would be converted to Chaos). That off-hand also converts pet Cold damage to Chaos, so there’s at least some synergy. Where does it go wrong, outside the 6 sec. cooldown to cast Reap Spirit and the total lack of AoE in the skill? NO RR! If something like this were to work, I would suggest - at a minimum - some modifiers to the Black Scourge weapon like “-15% Chaos Resistance to Bloody Pox” + “300% Chaos Damage to Call of the Grave” so that it works similarly to the Claw of Hagaraz weapon.
Further Note: I’ve attempted to theorycraft something like this as a Defiler. There are currently more +Reap Spirit items that either give 0 damage bonuses or actually convert Chaos damage to another type entirely than items that give relevant damage bonuses. Demo may have Chaos RR but there are so few options for Chaos + Reap Spirit that the build just became a combination of no pet stats (since Demo doesn’t give any of the bonuses that Occultist does and Flame Touched only gives +Fire and +Lightning bonuses to pets) and pitiful player %Chaos damage.
- Occultist + Demolitionist: Something that came completely under the radar for me was patch 1.1.6.0 giving Blood of Chthon* pet bonuses in addition to the player conversion. At the very least, it means Raven and Hellhound have both of their elemental damage converted to Chaos, while also giving the player access to abilities like fully Chaos Blackwater Cocktail and Thermite Mines. Thermite Mines has the RR to pull it off, a lack of Exclusive skill means you can take Possession and its Chaos bonuses, and BlackWater Cocktail provides enough flat RR that you don’t have to worry about routing your devotions toward getting it. The problem? No pet %Health, no pet %Speed, no pet resistances (or any resistances in the Demo class, for that matter), and Flame Touched provides no %Chaos bonuses. I’ve attempted hybrid pet Pyromancers in the past that have used Mythical Black Scourge or Mythical Dracarris in combination with the old Riftstone that provided the nuke necessary to proc the death bonuses, but the build’s defenses were far too weak to handle Nemesis-level enemies.
*Note - using Blood of Chthon to give pets Blood Rite means that you’re combining it with Dying God for a whopping -500 Health Regeneration per second. On a pet build. That has no ADCTH and doesn’t have the damage output from weapon damage to leech any meaningful health even if you did have ADCTH. Where at any one time you can have Grava’Thul + Reaper + Iron Maiden charging at you and hitting you simultaneously. Yeah…
- Occultist + Inquisitor: Inquisitor is a much better support class than the Demolitionist, having a second heal in Word of Renewal, pet Aether and Chaos resistance, and flat Physical damage that can be converted into Chaos. Chaos Deceivers are not entirely unheard of, with the Black Scorch helmet providing an additional Chaos RR to Word of Pain. Sadly, while FG provided a multitude of pet items that give bonuses to IEE for pet Arcanists and Flame Touched for pet Demos, there is nothing that provides +Steel Resolve and pet bonuses. In addition, you have even fewer options for a nuke to supply the Scourge critters, as there is only 1 item that gives +Doom Bolt and pet bonuses and nothing on the Inquisitor side gives anything remotely close to pet support (maybe maxed out Word of Pain + Word of Agony for a nuke?). I’ve made an extensive thread on my pet Deceiver that eschewed the pet Sets and went for flat damage stacking to support Primal Instinct, and it could barely get past Gladiator 100. Bysmiel set can easily work as a Deceiver, but Chaos pets using Mythical Black Scourge? Naaaaaah.
Moral of the story is - if you want to have pet builds make use of “On Enemy Death” procs, you need to give the player a big nuke that they can take close to hardcap and have it reliably kill enemies to use the proc. Let’s ignore the fact that the game is now balanced on killing 3-4 Nemesis enemies where “On Enemy Death” procs see little use. Let’s ignore the fact that you’re often too busy just trying to survive and manage your pets that it’s hard to see which enemies are weak enough so that you can snag the kill from your pets. There is outright no synergy between Occultist pet equipment and Doom Bolt + other nukes that could conceivably bring the deaths necessary to bring about the proc, and even if it were to work, there is no way to sustain the number of enemy kills necessary for the Black Scourge critters to be a reliable source of DPS for your build. I can conjure up some equipment ideas that provide skill bonuses to the right locations (Fiendmaster Raiment giving pet Chaos bonuses but giving +3 to Siphon Souls, wtf?), but there needs to be a significant overhaul for something like your vision to work properly.